The goals of Semantic Web technology include creating a structurally uniform representation of heterogeneous data, data models, and application domain models in a stack of computer languages, RDF (Resource Description Framework), RDFS (RDF Schema), OWL (Web Ontology Language) and SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language), also known as the Semantic Web stack. The Semantic Web as a computing process, architecture and form of organizing data has been described and implemented in various ways by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), which is the industry group that maintains Internet protocol and data formatting standards. For more information on the semantic web, see “Semantic Web in Action”, Scientific American, December 2007, Feigenbaum et. al., incorporated herein by reference. RDF is a graph representation of data. SPARQL is an SQL-like language for querying RDF data sources. RDFS and OWL provide richer means to encode structure and domain models and logic. The entire system is object-oriented where RDFS and OWL inherit from RDF. The entire stack is well grounded to integrate knowledge-based, and logic-based solutions to data integration, mining and analysis problems.
Relational database management systems support a wide range of applications. Relational databases comprise data stored as records in tables, (synonymously rows in relations). Each table defines a record structure comprising a set of named columns. SQL is a standardized language used to define and query relational databases.
This invention is a system and method for integrating relational databases into a semantic web framework utilizing a simple mapping process and the SQL query optimizer present in the SQL database engine. Functionally this means, a domain model for the relational database is made available in a Semantic Web language and the database contents is made available for retrieval through standard SPARQL query and linked-data end-points.